Zachary and I have been working on his preschool e-notebook today. Go to his blog to see his Spiderman E-Notebook entries for telling time and keeping track of skills he is learning.

The older kids have the remainder of the week off for Christmas break, but 5 year old Zachary is getting started up now because he is on fire for learning after getting his own computer with all those educational games on it. His favorite ones are the math games right now, so we worked on his math wall a bit more today.

He has had the calendar up but we used wipe off markers to write in the numbers before. The problem with that was that the wipeoff marker didn't want to come off without major elbowgrease at the end of the month, so we switched to taping number squares on instead. These will be useful to introduce him to the idea of a number line too.

He has struggled with getting his 9s and 6s confused in the past. Today he came up with a liitle saying that seems to have solved the problem: Six Sits and Nine stretches his Neck. He has been thrilled with his newfound 'trick'.

I don't know if you can make out the little 'math men' that are standing in a row just above the calendar. I made these little guys when Gregory was young to motivate him and help me track where he was and where he was to go next. Each one has a skill written at the bottom. When a skill is being worked on or is mastered it gets a little flag stuck to the bottom of it. I am thinking about using the math men somehow in his preschool notebook design - though for Zach I may update them and make them math spidermen to fit with the theme of his e-notebook. I am thinking about doing some design work on his blog like this too. He will be thrilled with that idea. I better watch out or I will be remaking all the wall mounted mathmen too. LOL.

The CD (version 2.03) of Treasure Mathstorm arrived this morning. We have an ancient (more than 10 years old) disk (version 1.0) of this favorite game, but I was worried that it would soon be unreadable as age impacts magnetic material considerably. Zach has been having a great time with the program! Here he is using pennies as manipulatives to help himself solve 6 + 3. He has been solving addition problems, telling time to 30 minutes, using virtual pennies to buy nets, figuring out what weights to put on one side of a scale to equal the amount on the other, and counting, counting, counting. I love this program. Well worth the $6!

Zachary has his own learning journal on HomeschoolBlogger now. I figured that while we are working on his Preschool E-notebook, I would do his learning journal to go along with it - just like the big kids in the family are doing.

You will find a link to his learning journal in the side bar to the right. Below is a quick preview of the first post. It is the cover of his preschool e-notebook.